New Zealand

Tags

Time ironically isn't on Apple's side in Switzerland

Lately I must have read about 40 articles pertaining to the fact that the Apple Watch is going to be a failure, a flop - and some have even called it Apple's answer to the Zoon. Though many a similar thing was said about the iPad and even precursory about the iPod itself.

Now obviously, wearables are still in their early stages of adoption and currently the majority of wearers of these are little more than this generation’s Yuppies - however, this product will change that; it is going to cause everyone to adopt wearables. Notice I didn't say wear, I said adopt, which means there will still be traditionalists who avoid them.

Those traditionalists, many of whom still use blackberries are the Omegas, the Breguets and the Tag Heuers. These people are going to be the hardest to penetrate when it comes to this market.

Well poor Apple, they've just found a market that with a twist of fate they can't get.

Due to some weird occurrence Leonard has a legal restriction that stops the use of the world ‘Apple’, or even the symbol of an apple, being associated with a time piece (Damn it should have called it the iWatch when they had the chance). Now this may be a hurdle for Apple to overcome obviously as everyone from Alpina to Zenith rely on the Swiss market as the birth of the modern timepiece.

Again, this hurdle is something that over the next few days will be perpetuated and pushed to the point of ‘Apple holds back release of watch’ and a bunch of other attention grabbing headlines, but the fact of it is, Apple could buy and sell the majority of all the Swiss watch making companies and have enough change to get a nice lunch.

This isn't going to hold them back for two reasons:

1. The Chinese market is the only market that will determine the true success of the product launch, that is the market they will focus completely on. Predictively that is also going to be where the most ‘high-end’ luxury Apple watches are sold.
2. Last time this rubbish happened, it happened with the iPhone, and what happened was Cisco got a nice chunk of change and their iPhone was dropped to the footnote of a Wikipedia page that is too insignificant to be included in a pub trivia quiz.

Call me old fashioned, but I'd much rather have a Breguet on my wrist. Though for how long will I be saying that, and am I one of the last to think this way?